Imagine Surgeons Not Wearing Rubber Gloves

"Joseph Colt Bloodgood (1 November 1867 – 22 October 1935) was a prominent surgeon in the United States based in Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland.

 He was known for insisting on the use of rubber gloves by the entire surgical team, for advances in methods of identifying and treating benign and malignant cancers, particularly breast and bone cancers, and for advocating education of the public so they would seek routine medical examinations, even before any signs of cancer appeared."




"The Hippocratic Oath is an oath of ethics historically taken by physicians.

 It is one of the most widely known of Greek medical texts. In its original form, it requires a new physician to swear, by a number of healing gods, to uphold specific ethical standards. 

The oath is the earliest expression of medical ethics in the Western world, establishing several principles of medical ethics which remain of paramount significance today.

 These include the principles of medical confidentiality and non-maleficence."


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"The Hippocratic Corpus (Latin: Corpus Hippocraticum), or Hippocratic Collection, is a collection of around 60 early Ancient Greek medical works strongly associated with the physician Hippocrates and his teachings. Even though it is considered as a singular corpus that represents Hippocratic medicine, they vary (sometimes significantly) in content, age, style, methods, and views practiced; therefore, authorship is largely unknown.

Hippocrates began society's development of medicine, through a delicate blending of the art of healing and scientific observations.The Hippocratic Corpus became the foundation for which all future medical systems would be built."

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"Bloodgood was the first surgeon to demand that everyone involved in an operation wear rubber gloves.

He followed Halstead's advice in taking care to control bleeding during surgery so as to avoid the need for excessive haste. The probability of curing the patient was much higher with a careful and systematic approach to removing all cancerous tissue.

Bloodgood became extremely skilled with microscopic examination and diagnosis. Other surgeons often referred slides to Bloodgood when they were uncertain about the pathology.

He noted that "when cancer becomes a microscopic disease, there must be tissue diagnosis in the operating room".

 He would take many tissue samples during an operation, and would leave an operation while he prepared and examined the frozen sections. He would also temporarily leave one operation to take part in another."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Colt_Bloodgood